Features & Reviews
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Writing Outside the Box: A Conversation with Taymour Soomro
Do I want to be writing the way that I think literary fiction ought to be written? That’s starting to not seem so interesting to me anymore.
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The Anger of Memory: Teju Cole’s Tremor
In this, Cole has taken the “tragedy” of a transcontinental survivalist to spin a narrative that transcends the conventional perimeters of a novel.
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The Gift and Burden of Ancestral Stories: A Conversation with Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
Some of my favorite moments and scenes are when characters do something surprising that bends toward humor or something selfless that reaches for connection.
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A Lament, A Call to Action, A Love Story: A Conversation with Alejandro Varela
There’s truth in everything we write, but there’s a lot of fabrication and fantasy, and you don’t have that freedom with science.
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Owning the Self: Yesenia Montilla’s Muse Found in a Colonized Body
I only care about revolution / & the ugly business of revenge.
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The Tether Between Poetry and Science: a conversation with Emily Hockaday
Just as my body that might ache all night is the same body that gives me pleasure. And I feel it aching because I am alive and living in it.
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A Literature for Lost Souls: Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound
Vasyakina powerfully encompasses the absurd and expansive universe of what Gogol described as the “unbridled incomprehensible Rus,” her homeland land with its terrors, its poetry and loftiness and its magic, to the skin and bones of the tender and violent…
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The Confines of Masculinity Are Killing Us: A Conversation with Joe Milan Jr.
We believe we grant access to our lives to others; I think that is an illusion.
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The Way America Treats Teens Is Unacceptable: A Conversation with Emi Nietfeld
Being affected in those ways can give us motivation to make sure that other people aren’t hurt in the same ways that we’ve been hurt.
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Food and Fraternity: Bryan Washington’s Family Meal
Reading a new book by an admired writer offers the chance to recapture the familiar pleasures of their previous work—the equivalent of ordering your favorite dish at a restaurant again, comparing it to the version that only lives in your…
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Staking Ground in Multiple Lands: A Conversation with Ghassan Zeineddine
I don’t consciously look for symbols while I’m writing; they come to me from being in the community.
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The World of Family and the Otherworldly: Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Dear Outsiders
Odd and evocative, Dear Outsiders does what literature does best—it takes the reader into a new world which changes them while it too changes.